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Close Readings
Close Readings is a multi-series podcast from the London Review of Books. Two contributors explore areas of literature through a selection of key works, providing an introductory grounding like no other. Listen to some episodes for free here, and extracts from our ongoing subscriber-only series. How To Subscribe In Apple Podcasts, click 'subscribe' at the top of this podcast feed to unlock the full episodes. Or for other podcast apps, sign up here: https://lrb.me/closereadings RUNNING IN 2026…
Episodes
Close ReadingsNarrative Poems: ‘Enoch Arden’ by Alfred Tennyson
In the early 1860s, Tennyson was at the height of his celebrity. His great elegy, In Memoriam (1850), seemed to have captured the spiritual unease of the age…
Close ReadingsThe Man Behind the Curtain: ‘Ulysses’ by James Joyce
Tom McCarthy, writing in the LRB, described James Joyce's Ulysses as a ‘heavy book, a book full of weight, a fallen book’; a ‘properly obscene book’; ‘a book…
Close ReadingsNature in Crisis: ‘Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism’ by Thea Riofrancos
Lithium-ion batteries are at the heart of the transition away from fossil fuels. But lithium, like the copper, cobalt and rare earths that renewable…
Close ReadingsWho’s afraid of realism? ‘Shyness and Dignity’ by Dag Solstad
What happens when the techniques of realist literature become absorbed into our understanding of real life? And what would it mean to try to depict that…
Close ReadingsLondon Revisited: The Monster
In 1737, Samuel Johnson and his student David Garrick decided to walk to London from Lichfield in search of opportunity. It worked out well for both of them…
Close ReadingsNarrative Poems: ‘Amours de Voyage’ by Arthur Hugh Clough
In 1848, Arthur Hugh Clough resigned his fellowship at Oxford after realising that he could no longer in good conscience teach the doctrines of the Anglican…
Close ReadingsNature in Crisis: ‘The Rise of Ecofascism: Climate Change and the Far Right’ by Alex Roberts and Sam Moore
‘The Rise of Ecofascism: Climate Change and the Far Right’ is a different kind of book from the others Meehan and Peter have discussed so far in their series…
Close ReadingsNature in Crisis: ‘The Rise of Ecofascism: Climate Change and the Far Right’ by Alex Roberts and Sam Moore
‘The Rise of Ecofascism: Climate Change and the Far Right’ is a different kind of book from the others Meehan and Peter have discussed so far in their series…
Close ReadingsWho’s afraid of realism?: ‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’ by Muriel Spark
When Muriel Spark describes the art teacher, Mr Lloyd, in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, she writes that ‘most wonderful of all, he had only one arm, the…
Close ReadingsLondon Revisited: Coffee, Satire and Bubbles
The coffee served in London in the 1690s was notoriously unappetising, likened at the time to ‘burnt shoes and charcoal’. Nonetheless it was extremely popular…
Close ReadingsNarrative Poems: ‘Childe Roland’ and ‘The Pied Piper’ by Robert Browning
‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’ has baffled readers and critics ever since it was published in Men and Women in 1855. It baffled its author, too. It…
Close ReadingsNature in Crisis: ‘Lessons for Survival’ by Emily Raboteau
Over the past twelve years, the walls and shop shutters of Upper Manhattan have been gradually filled by giant paintings of climate-threatened birds, inspired…
Close ReadingsWho’s afraid of realism? ‘Pnin’ by Vladimir Nabokov
If Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day (1956) belongs firmly to postwar American realism, then Pnin (1957) certainly doesn’t. With its self-conscious fictionality and…
Close ReadingsLondon Revisited: Pepys, Plague and Fire
The restoration of the monarchy in 1660 brought a flurry of changes to London life. Women were allowed to appear on stage for the first time, the Royal Society…
Close ReadingsNarrative Poems: ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ by John Keats
According to legend, a young woman who observes certain rites on 20 January, the Eve of St Agnes, will see in her dreams the man she is going to marry. When…
Close ReadingsThe Man Behind the Curtain: ‘Middlemarch’ by George Eliot
In ‘Middlemarch’, Tom McCarthy argues, George Eliot uses her ‘study of provincial life’ as a Trojan Horse to smuggle the continental philosophy of Spinoza and…
Close ReadingsNature in Crisis: ‘Impasse’ by Roy Scranton
At Chaco Canyon in the New Mexico desert lie the ruins of a once vibrant and extensive Ancestral Puebloan civilisation. Sometime in the 12th century the…
Close ReadingsWho’s afraid of realism? ‘Seize the Day’ by Saul Bellow
‘Seize the Day’ was published in 1956, but its grammar of realism was barely changed from that deployed in ‘Madame Bovary’ exactly a hundred years earlier. The…
Close ReadingsLondon Revisited: The Road to Civil War
When James VI of Scotland arrived in London in 1603 to become the first ‘King of Great Britain’, expectations were high. They were soon disappointed, not least…
Close ReadingsNarrative Poems: ‘The Ruined Cottage’ and ‘Michael’ by William Wordsworth
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was one of the first people to hear ‘The Ruined Cottage’, read aloud to him on a visit to the Wordsworths in 1797, and he later…
Close ReadingsNature in Crisis: ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’ by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Through folktales, memoir and hard science, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass argues for the intertwining of Indigenous knowledge systems and empirical…
Close ReadingsWho’s afraid of realism? ‘Voyage in the Dark’ by Jean Rhys
In ‘A Room of One’s Own’, Virginia Woolf writes about how radical it feels to read the sentences: ‘Chloe liked Olivia. They shared a laboratory together…’…
Close ReadingsLondon Revisited: Shakespeare’s City
When Thomas Platter, a Swiss tourist, went to see ‘Julius Caesar’ at the Globe Theatre in 1599, it wasn’t Shakespeare’s language that attracted his attention…
Close ReadingsNarrative Poems: ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
In her diary entry for 20 November 1797, Dorothy Wordsworth describes a late afternoon walk with her brother William and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. ‘ We went…
Close ReadingsNature in Crisis: ‘Is a River Alive?’ by Robert Macfarlane
The idea that a river is a living being has important legal consequences. But it also has imaginative consequences, which can, in George Eliot’s words…
Close ReadingsWho’s afraid of realism? ‘Mrs Dalloway’ by Virginia Woolf
In August 1923, halfway through writing ‘Mrs Dalloway’, Virginia Woolf recorded a new idea in her diary: she would ‘dig out beautiful caves’ behind her…
Close ReadingsLondon Revisited: The Protestant Capital
At the start of the 16th century London was still recognisably medieval, crowded within its walls, dominated by churches and monasteries and deeply tied to…
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Have you got four minutes to share your feedback on Close Readings? It will help shape how we develop the podcast over the coming year. We’ve set up a short…
Close ReadingsNarrative Poems: ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ by Robert Burns and ‘Peter Grimes’ by George Crabbe
‘Tam o’ Shanter’ first appeared as a lengthy footnote in Francis Grose's Antiquities of Scotland (1791) after Robert Burns convinced Grose to include the…
Close ReadingsNature in Crisis: 'Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth' by James Lovelock
In ‘Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth’ (1979), James Lovelock proposed that the Earth is something like a single living organism, capable of manipulating its…
Close ReadingsWho’s afraid of realism? ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’ by Leo Tolstoy
In the late 1870s, shortly after the publication of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy experienced what might be described today as a midlife crisis. In his short…
Close ReadingsThe Man Behind the Curtain: ‘Frankenstein’ by Mary Shelley
Mary Shelley signed off her introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein by bidding her ‘hideous progeny go forth and prosper’. In this episode of The Man…
Close ReadingsLondon Revisited: Plague, Rebellion and Guilds
If historians of medieval London had a patron saint, it might well be Edward I. While many English monarchs chose to leave London to its own devices, Edward…
Close ReadingsNarrative Poems: ‘The Rape of the Lock’ by Alexander Pope
Sometime in 1711, a twenty-year-old aristocrat, Lord Petre, snipped a lock of hair, without permission, from the head of Arabella Fermor, a celebrated beauty…
Close ReadingsNature in Crisis: ‘The Burning Earth’ by Sunil Amrith
The ‘great acceleration’ is a term used to describe the dramatic surge in the 1950s of both human and earth systems indicators that marked a shift from a…
Close ReadingsWho’s afraid of realism? Three stories by Anton Chekhov
‘Instead of sheets – dirty tablecloths.’ The notebooks of Anton Chekhov are full of enigmatic observations such as this, the unexplained details that suggest a…
Close ReadingsLondon Revisited: The Medieval Capital
When the Angles, Saxons and Jutes began settling across England in the wake of the Roman retreat in the early fifth century, the city they found on the north…
Close ReadingsNarrative Poems: ‘Paradise Lost’ (Book 9) by John Milton
When Milton came to describe Eve’s tasting of the forbidden fruit, he knew he couldn’t rely on suspense to grip the reader. Instead, he used multiple genres…
Close ReadingsNature in Crisis: ‘Blue Machine’ by Helen Czerski
In Blue Machine (2024), Helen Czerski refigures the ocean as an enormous planetary engine, converting light and heat into motion. Her book invites us to see…
Close ReadingsWho’s afraid of realism? ‘Notes from Underground’ by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dostoevsky’s 1864 novella doesn’t contain the descriptive detail, impersonal narration or many other features of 19th-century realism established by Flaubert…
Close ReadingsLondon Revisited: Mosaics, Archers and a Walled Garden
After Roman London was hit by a catastrophic fire in about 125 AD, perhaps the result of another local revolt, it entered a new period of sophistication which…
Close ReadingsNarrative Poems: 'Venus and Adonis' and 'The Rape of Lucrece' by William Shakespeare
Like Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare made good use of his time off when the theatres were shut for plague in 1593. 'Venus and Adonis' appeared in…
Close ReadingsNature in Crisis: ‘The Light Eaters’ by Zoë Schlanger
In The Light Eaters (2024), Zoë Schlanger reports from the frontiers of botany, where researchers are discovering forms of sensing, signalling and responding…
Close ReadingsWho’s afraid of realism? ‘Madame Bovary’ by Gustave Flaubert (part two)
‘He opened him up and found nothing.’ These are the doctor’s findings at Charles Bovary’s autopsy near the end of 'Madame Bovary'. Taken on its own, it’s a…
Close ReadingsLondon Revisited: Roman Beginnings
The year London was founded will always be disputed, but the most recent archaeological evidence suggests the Romans had created the first settlement on the…
Close ReadingsNarrative Poems: 'Hero and Leander' by Christopher Marlowe
'Hero and Leander' was published in 1598, and anyone who came across it in a stationer’s shop in Elizabethan London would have known that its author was dead…
Close ReadingsNature in Crisis: ‘Silent Spring’ by Rachel Carson
After following up a lead from a birdwatcher, Rachel Carson drew a web of connections that led to one of the most influential books of the 20th century. Silent…
Close ReadingsWho's afraid of realism? 'Madame Bovary' by Gustave Flaubert (part one)
Gustave Flaubert recalled in a letter that the critic Sainte-Beuve compared his style to a surgeon’s scalpel, an image taken from 'Madame Bovary'. This was not…
Close ReadingsThe Man Behind the Curtain: ‘Don Quixote’ by Miguel de Cervantes
In The Man Behind the Curtain, a bonus Close Readings series for 2026, Tom McCarthy and Thomas Jones examine great novels in terms of the systems and…
Close ReadingsNovel Approaches: ‘New Grub Street’ by George Gissing
George Gissing’s novels, Orwell once said, could be described in three words: ‘not enough money’. Writing is a matter of survival for the cast of ‘New Grub…
Close ReadingsNovel Approaches: ‘A Christmas Carol’ by Charles Dickens
Did Dickens ruin Christmas? He was certainly a pioneer in exploiting its commercial potential. A Christmas Carol sold 6,000 copies in five days when it was…
Close ReadingsLove and Death: Samuel Johnson, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Mick Imlah
Samuel Johnson’s doctor, Robert Levet, had piecemeal medical knowledge at best, was described as an ‘an obscure practiser in physick’ by James Boswell and was…
Close ReadingsFiction and the Fantastic: A Taxonomy
Though the last twelve episodes have taken Marina Warner and her interlocutors through many worlds and texts, no series could ever encompass the full scope of…
Close ReadingsConversations in Philosophy: 'To the Lighthouse' by Virginia Woolf
In 1908, Virginia Woolf wrote that she hoped to revolutionise the novel and ‘capture multitudes of things at present fugitive’. ‘To the Lighthouse’ (1927)…
Close ReadingsNovel Approaches: ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge’ by Thomas Hardy
After drunkenly selling his wife and child at auction, a young Michael Henchard resolves to live differently – and does so, skyrocketing from impoverished…
Close ReadingsNext Year on Close Readings: Realism, Nature, Narrative Poems and a history of London
We’re pleased to announce our four new Close Readings series starting in January next year: ‘Who’s Afraid of Realism?’ with James Wood and guests ‘Nature in…
Close ReadingsLove and Death: Thom Gunn and Paul Muldoon
Thom Gunn’s career as an elegist was tied closely to the onset of the Aids epidemic in the 1980s, during which he saw many of his friends die. Despite…
Close ReadingsFiction and the Fantastic: Two Novels by Ursula K. Le Guin
When the polymorphous writer Ursula K. Le Guin died in 2018, she left behind novels, short stories, poetry, essays, manifestos and French and Chinese…
Close ReadingsConversations in Philosophy: 'The Sovereignty of Good' by Iris Murdoch
Imagine a woman setting herself the task of liking her son’s choice of wife. At first she finds her daughter-in-law unbearable, but through the effort of…
Close ReadingsNovel Approaches: ‘Kidnapped’ by Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped began life serialised in a children’s magazine, but its sophistication and depth won the lifelong admiration of Henry James…